Thursday, April 15, 2010

There are certain awards that would be a pleasure to win, like an Olympic medal, the Pulitzer Prize, or a Nobel Prize.

Likewise, there are certain awards that a person of good sense might naturally shy away from, including Class Clown, a Darwin Award, and a “Pig Book” award.

And then there are some awards which one would accept with a degree of ambivalence, like “Miss Congeniality” at the Miss America pageant.

And the Oldest American.

Mary Josephine Ray, born on May 17, 1895, died on March 8, 2010 in New Hampshire at 114 years of age. She held the distinction as the second oldest living human (about a week younger than a woman in Japan), and the oldest living person in the United States. She survived her husband by 40 years and had five great-great grandchildren.

Upon Mary’s death, the mantle for oldest living American went to Neva Morris, also 114, of Ames, Iowa. While the Gerontology Research Group says there are only 75 people over 110 (“supercentenarians”) alive worldwide, there happen to be 941 centenarians in Iowa alone. Neva—and here’s where the ambivalent part of the award comes in—died on April 7, passing on the crown, and passing on gently herself, after only a month. The oldest living American is now spry, 113-year-old Eunice Sanborn of Jacksonville, Texas.

If these three women had been born consecutively instead of contemporaneously, their combined lives would stretch back to 1669, over a century before America became a country. That sort of math makes the country feel very, very young.

One of my brothers was born in 1959. Years ago he shook the hand of a man who said to him: “You have now shaken the hand of a man who has shaken the hand of a man who shook hands with Abraham Lincoln.” That’s fewer degrees of separation than to Kevin Bacon.

In demographic terms, Mary, Neva and Eunice are all members of (what Strauss and Howe call) the “Lost Generation,” born 1883-1900. They had, generationally-speaking, a rowdy childhood followed by a life cycle divided in thirds by two world wars. Members of the Lost Generation included F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, George Gershwin, Babe Ruth and Ernest Hemingway. Their grandparents were from the Gilded Generation and their grandchildren were Boomers. If the last of their generation lives 114 years, they’ll all be gone by 2015.

Now, let’s say a combination of better living and better medicine allow Baby Boomers to live a few more years than the 114 that seems to be the limit of modern longevity. So, the last of the Baby Boomers lives to be, say, 118. (It’s possible I’ve got this wrong, that medicine is a step-function that will push us from 114 to 150 and pass everything in between.) But, if you accept the 118, and the last Baby Boomer was born in 1960, that means my generation is going to be around until 2078.

Think about that, Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Millennium and future Gen iPad and Gen Globally Warmed. You’re going to have to put up with all our good advice about how to run the world for another 68 years.

A while back I came across the “Extinction Timeline” which hypothesized the end of many things you and I might otherwise assume to be fixed. (It comes with a caveat that it not be taken too seriously.) For instance, petrol engines are gone around 2038 (makes sense), but a “good night’s sleep,” “wallets,” “peace and quiet” and the British royalty are also all gone by 2040. The “family room” is extinct by 2045, Google by 2049 and “Physical Pain and Uglyness” by 2054.

It's nice to know the Boomers will at least be beautiful for their last 20 years on earth, even if they can’t Google anything. I'm also sorry to say to the rest of you that "automobile turn signals" are not on the list of things that will be extinct; that means, by 2050, there are going to be millions of us Boomers driving with our right blinker on, intending to turn left.

But wait: the timeline predicts that “Death” will be extinct by about 2060. The youngest Boomers won’t even be 100 by then.

Saturday, April 10, 2010

The first class we took in business school having to do with people management was called Organizational Behavior. It was a required course in the first-year curriculum, but one that seemed trivial after a hard day of Marketing, Operations Research, and Finance cases. After all, we were much more concerned about learning how to break bottlenecks on the assembly line, launch new products and compare net present values. The “soft side” of business was easy.

I’ve mentioned before the little pep-talk we received from our professor on the first day of “OB” informing us that this was going to be one of the most important courses we ever took. He said, and I’m paraphrasing roughly, “Anyone can learn to discount cash flows. Not everyone can manage or lead people. You might want to pay attention.”

We laughed. We scoffed.

Funny thing: The other day I was sitting in a meeting with some venture capitalists when one of them remarked, “You know, we have all these great companies with all of this really cool technology, and we spend almost all of our time talking about people.”

He was not laughing. His partners did not scoff.

In fact, his comment rocketed me to that day almost 30 years ago. Maybe we really did need to pay attention in OB. Turns out you put a few hundred million dollars to work in a bunch of technology markets and all you really have to count on is people.

I’ve been leafing through The Essential Drucker again and am always amazed at how early and clearly Peter understood how business worked. “Management is about human beings,” he wrote. “Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.”

It’s the way, I’ve mentioned before, that Duke Ellington arranged music for his band; if the trumpet player could hit the high notes, the trumpet player inevitably got arrangements that had lots of high notes.

Would we could do that for everyone.

What’s ironic, of course, is that in our desire to improve the art and science of Management we’ve created all kinds of sham distinctions. So, boring old Management turns out to be different than flashy new Entrepreneurship, both of which are different than heroic Leadership.

Thinkers like Drucker aren’t having any of it. Making a distinction between Management and Entrepreneurship, Drucker wrote, is like saying “that the fingering hand and the bow hand of the violinist are ‘adversaries.’” The lack of entrepreneurial thinking, he reminded us, is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations, while the inability to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.

This is accomplished, Mintzberg says, by people capable of managing and leading. “Would you like to work for a manager who doesn’t lead? That can be terribly discouraging. What about a leader who doesn’t manage? That can be awfully disengaging.”

“We have had more than enough of detached, heroic leadership,” Mintzberg believes. “It is time for more engaged management, embedded in “communityship.”

I might say it a different way: There should be signs hanging over our great technology communities, and maybe over each of our companies’ front doors, that remind us (no matter how cool the technology or healthy the Net Present Value): “It’s The People, Stupid.”

Saturday, April 3, 2010

One of the most famous motivational stories on the entrepreneurial circuit is that of the two salesmen from competing companies who are sent to a foreign country to assess the market for shoes.

Salesman One scouts around for a few days and then heads for the telegraph office to contact company headquarters. He writes: "Research complete. Unmitigated disaster. Nobody here wears shoes."

Likewise, Salesman Two does his research and heads for the same telegraph office. Once there, he composes the following: "Research complete. Glorious opportunity! Nobody here wears shoes!"

The point, of course, is that Salesman Two is the real entrepreneur, the person who sees opportunity where others do not. It's a story designed to motivate us all to see potential, take risks, and to turn obstacles into opportunities.

The question is: Should we bite? Does fate reward the visionary risk-taker?

Late last year, a librarian at the BritishMuseum discovered a short manuscript in a long-forgotten file. It turns out that the story of the two shoe salesman was more than myth.